The "official" release of Intel's X48 chipset is on the horizon, which means the major manufacturers are readying their products for release. We already have several X48 boards in-house that we are running through the paces and feel confident enough to start providing a few unique performance previews over the coming days.

The first board up is Gigabyte's GA-X48T-DQ6 that features DDR3 capabilities and a whole host of technology improvements such as Dynamic Power Saver (DPS), improved components and circuitry layout, auto DDR3-1900 overclocking via XMP, and 2-phase power designs for the X48 MCH chipset and memory slots. We will provide an overview into these features, BIOS design, and complete performance results in our next article, but for now, let's see how this board performs when pushed to the limit with our Cascade cooling setup.